{"id":39759,"date":"2015-01-31T01:48:47","date_gmt":"2015-01-31T01:48:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=39759"},"modified":"2015-01-31T01:48:47","modified_gmt":"2015-01-31T01:48:47","slug":"dear-hollywood-lets-stop-making-movies-like-black-or-white","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=39759","title":{"rendered":"Dear Hollywood: Let’s Stop Making Movies Like “Black or White”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dear Hollywood: Let’s Stop Making Movies Like “Black or White”<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Forbes<\/a>
\n2015-01-30<\/p>\n

Rebecca Theodore<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Halfway through the family drama \u201cBlack Or White<\/a>,\u201d Jeremiah Jeffers (Anthony Mackie<\/a>) an Ivy-League educated lawyer, chastises his drug addict nephew Reggie (Andre Holland<\/a>) in the midst of helping him regain custody of his daughter by asking, \u201cWhy do you have to be such a stereotype?\u201d<\/p>\n

A question I repeatedly asked myself as I had to suffer through yet another one of Hollywood\u2019s<\/a> latest \u201cWhite Is Right\u201d films about racial relations. In \u201cBlack or White\u201d Kevin Costner<\/a> stars as Elliot Anderson, a successful lawyer who is left to raise his biracial granddaughter Eloise, when his wife dies unexpectedly. Elliot\u2019s life becomes further complicated with an escalating drinking problem and a fight for Eloise from her absentee father and paternal grandmother (Octavia Spencer<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Black or White\u201d is the Iggy Azalea<\/a> of race films \u2013 it operates under the guise of being progressive and furthering the \u201cconversation\u201d about race, but only serves to exalt Whiteness by marginalizing Blackness. The movie is chock full of Black tropes<\/a> and stereotypes; the overbearing matriarch who coddles and enables her son\u2019s inexcusable behavior, the \u201cAngry Black Man\u201d (Mackie) and the \u201cMagical Negro<\/a>\u201d with Duvan (Mpho Koaho<\/a>), who starts off as a math tutor for Eloise, but soon finds himself dispensing wise advice and becoming a personal chauffeur to Elliot when he\u2019s too drunk to drive.<\/p>\n

You would think in 2015 Hollywood would have evolved from such reductive narratives about race, but according to Dr. Jason Johnson<\/a>, a political analyst and a professor of political science at Hiram College, it\u2019s business as usual. \u201cIt is part of a genre movie we have always had, that\u2019s making a comeback which I like to call the \u201cReasonable White Man\u201d movie,\u201d Johnson explains. \u201cThey are films that are ostensibly about race but are extended polemics where so-called progressive Whites are saying \u2018I\u2019m the only one who has a reasonable perspective on this and Blacks are irrational and unreasonable.\u201d…<\/p>\n

Read the entire\u00a0review\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dear Hollywood: Let’s Stop Making Movies Like “Black or White” Forbes 2015-01-30 Rebecca Theodore Halfway through the family drama \u201cBlack Or White,\u201d Jeremiah Jeffers (Anthony Mackie) an Ivy-League educated lawyer, chastises his drug addict nephew Reggie (Andre Holland) in the midst of helping him regain custody of his daughter by asking, \u201cWhy do you have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,8,20],"tags":[19188,18951,19205,19137,19204],"class_list":["post-39759","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-black-or-white","tag-forbes","tag-jason-johnson","tag-kevin-costner","tag-rebecca-theodore"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39759","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39759"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39759\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39759"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39759"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39759"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}